I’ll have comment on this, once I have a moment to really look at it. (20 month old girls never stop!) The following was cribbed from the Blood & Chrome page on Facebook (no infringement intended, copyright trolls!):

 

The Battlestar Task Group – Early Production Notes by Doug Dexler, the CG  supervisor

(Subject to change)

The Colonial Defense Force forms carrier battle groups on an as-needed basis and assigns ships to the group based on the mission. Therefore, no two Battlestar Task Groups are the same. However, a typical Battlestar Task Groups consists of the following ships:

Guided-missile cruisers (2)
These are offensive ships loaded with cruise missiles to strike planet based targets

Modern Colonial DFF guided missile cruisers perform primarily in a Battle Force role. These ships are multi-mission [Air Warfare (AW), Surface Warfare (SW), Fleet Surface Fire Support (FSFS) and Surface Warfare (SUW)] and capable of supporting Battlestar Task Groups (BTG), amphibious forces, or of operating independently and as flagships of surface action groups. Cruisers are equipped with cruise missiles giving them additional long range Strike Warfare (STRW) capability

Support Destroyers (2)
Defensive ships. They can defend against attacks by Base Stars and Raiders Destroyers.Equipped with the ability to launch missiles and lay down flak umbrellas.

CDG 51 and CDG 1000 destroyers are warships that provide multi-mission offensive and defensive capabilities. Destroyers can operate independently or as part of Battlestar strike groups, surface action groups, amphibious ready groups, and underway replenishment groups.

One stealth frigate (1) (The Reliant is a stealth Frigate)
Offensive\defensive ship. The frigate is a guided missile cruiser with a limited flight deck facility.

Can take Vipers and other attack planes into areas where a Battlestar would stick out like a sore thumb. They are shiny black

Stealth destroyers (2)
Offensive\defensive ships – The equivalent of a light cruiser.

Carries the latest in dradis bending technologies. They are shiny black

Dradis Picket Ships (6)
The fleets first line of defense. Our long range eyes in space

On the outer perimeters and often heavily attacked by Cylon Raiders. It’s the most dangerous job in the Battlestar Task Group.

Amphibious Attack Ship (2)
For putting boots on the ground. Modern Colonial Amphibious Assault Ships project power and maintain presence by serving as the cornerstone of the Amphibious Readiness Group (ARG) / Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG). Carries a combination of aircraft and landing craft.

Amphibious warships are designed to support Colonial Marine Corps tenets of Operational Maneuver From the Space (OMFTS) and Ship to Objective Maneuver (STOM). They must be able to sail in harm’s way and provide a rapid buildup of combat power ashore in the face of opposition. Because of their inherent capabilities, these ships have been and will continue to be called upon to also support humanitarian and other contingency missions on short notice.

Colonial Sealift Command (CSC)
Six Types Of Ships

Fast Combat Support Ships (FCS) – An ever shifting armada that keeps the Battlestar Task Group supplied.

Fleet Replenishment Tyliers (4)
The largest subset of Colonial Fleet Auxiliary Force ships, provide fuel to deployed Fleet ships underway, as well as to their assigned aircraft. Tyliers and the ships they refuel sail side by side as fuel hoses are extended across guide wires. Underway replenishment of fuel dramatically extends the time a Navy battle group can remain at sea.

Fast Combat Support Ships (2)
CSC’s four fast combat support ships provide one-stop shopping to the fleet for fuel, ammunition, food and other cargo. These ships are especially valuable because of their speed and ability to carry all the essentials to replenish Colonial DFF ships underway.

Dry Cargo/Ammunition Ships (4)
Four ammunition ships supply ordnance to Colonial combatants at sea, providing service through a combination of alongside transfers and replenishment lifts via Freight Trains. These ships are able to deliver ammunition, provisions, stores, spare parts, potable water and petroleum products to Battlestar Task Groups. Designed to operate for extended periods at sea.

Fleet Space Tugs (6)
These ships provide the Battlestar Task Groups (BTG), with towing service and can tow vessels as large as Light Cruisers. When augmented by divers, fleet tugs assist in the recovery of downed ships and aircraft.

Rescue and Salvage Ships (2)
CSC’s four rescue and salvage ships recover objects and stranded vessels and provide firefighting assistance. Like fleet space tugs, they are able to move objects like downed ships and aircraft. The key advantage of these ships is their ability to rapidly deploy divers to conduct rescue and salvage operations.

Hospital Ships (1)
Contains 24 operating rooms and up to 1,000 beds, including a medical staff of up to 1,200 military medical personnel.

One of the readers asked for some clarification on some of the traits that I’ve used in some of the material for the BSG game. One thing — one the pdfs, a red colored trait is a flaw. Here’s the clarifications:

BIOMECHANICAL (Asset, d2-d6): The vehicle is a combination of the biological and mechanical. It can repair itself over time, with Stun repairing as per characters at a point an hour or rest; Wounds, however, take much longer — a wound point is repaired per week, once the craft has passed it’s RESISTANCE test (VITALITY+VITALITY) and begun to heal. Most modern Cylon craft will have this.

CONSTRUCTION FACILITIES (Starship asset, d2-d6): The vessel can construct the number of planetcraft equal to its die rating a week (assuming it has the materials to build the craft in question. At d6, the machine shops are so good that with the proper raw materials, parts and vehicles can be constructed.

DIFFICULT TO REPAIR (Complications, d2, d4): The vessel is either overly complicated, has parts that are uncommon, or in some other way is a royal pain in the butt to keep running. This adds to repair and maintenance tests difficulties.

ENHANCED PERCEPTION (Spacecraft Asset, d2, d4): The vessel has its DRADIS and other sensors acting together as an interferometer to increase the acuity of the sensors. Add to vessel perception tests.

FAST THROTTLE (Asset, d2, d4): The vessel is particularly quick off the line, accelerating or decelerating faster than most vessels. In a chase, this is added to the operator’s test to flee or catch a vessel.

HANGAR QUEEN (Complication, d4): This vehicle is either a bad design, a Monday-morning build, or is beautifully designed and constructed, but finicky as hell (think a Ferrari…start it up and you need a valve job.) Anytime the vehicle is used it requires a Mechanical Engineering/Maintenance or Repair test, or it incurs d4S.

LIMITED SCANNING ANGLE (Complication d2, d4): The vehicle has some kind of blind spot in its visibility or scanning systems, and adds to the difficulty of perception tests by the vessel or its user.

MODIFIED AI (Asset, d2-d6): Cylons often find it easier to retrofit existing Colonial vehicles with a biomechanical brain and control systems. This means previously “dead” machines can operate independent of a crew (but still require maintenance from one.) If an enemy could destroy this “brain”, they could once again use the vehicle.

NBC HARDENED (Planetcraft Asset, d4): The vehicle is pressurized higher than that of the surrounding air to keep out nuclear/biological/chemical hazards. It is also constructed to minimize radioactive exposure.

SHORT RANGED (Spacecraft Complication, d4): The vessel is not designed for deep space operations and has neither the fuel, air, nor victuals to operate beyond up to an SU from its base of operations.

SLOW RESPONSE (Spacecraft Complication, d2-d6): The vessel either does not have magcat capabilities or they are limited (as in the Erynis-class.) At d2, only half of the fighter complement can be launched at a time, d4, a quarter, and at d6 a tenth of the fighter complement per turn. (I’m thinking of getting rid of the d6 and making this a d2, d4.)

SLOW THROTTLE (Flaw d2, d4): The vehicle is too heavy, underpowered, or suffers from some other design flaw that makes it slower to handle than other craft. This adds to the difficulty to flee or catch another vessel in a chase.

STEALTHY (Personal or Planetcraft Asset, d2, d4): The design of the craft, the color, or the DRADIS absorbent paint makes it had to see or scan for. Add the rating to the difficulty of to spot the vehicle.

WORKHORSE (Asset, d4): The thing is built to last. Mechanical Engineering/Repair tests have a step up to the skill die, it’s so easy to maintain.

Our Battlestar Galactica campaign returned last night after a week’s hiatus, and launched straight into a fast-paced push episode. Our Colonial Security Service (our analogue for the FBI) discovered a link that they had disregarded for more time-sensitive ones — that the thirteen suspected Cylon agents they had picked up had all attended a science-fiction convention on Leonis. Researching the event, he found out it had the venue moved from he usual 2 star hotel convention hall to a swanky high-end spa on the outskirts of Luminiere, the capital of Leonis.

This is immediately suspicious, as the spa is one of those 300 qubit/night places…hardly the place that they would move a convention. The spa is isolated, high-end, and has all manner of the therapeutic treatments for stress and injury. The place, to him, “feels” important, and the photo of the owner is familiar to him, but he can’t place where. It’s a weekend, and the leadership of Operation RIPTIDE is not in for the day. Realizing the link is very tenuous, but he has this gut feeling is very important, he convinces Commander Pindarus (another PC) to get them a loaner raptor from his soon-to-be new command Galactica. (There’ a fleet tradition that if you’ve been assigned, but haven’t officially taken command, the current CO will loan you non-mission essential gear.)

The characters grab a few of the Colonial Marines that are attached to RIPTIDE but haven’t left for their weekend travels yet, snag a raptor, and jump to Leonis to check out the lead. They arrive at night and we get a view of Luminiere, the “City of Lights”. The “Old City” is very Parisian, with old, elegant buildings, a river with bridges, everything lit with old style streetlamps. The rest of the city is a riot of neon, holo-ads, reactive streets that illuminate with traffic info to supplement the heads-up on your car. It’s like Shanghai, but without restraint.

The spa is in a forest preserve outside of town, and the officer characters, Pindarus and the Riptide lawyer CPT Querro, go in with the CSS agent, Chaplain, as patrons (expensing the trip.) Their four marines, one of which is SGT Cadmus (another PC). they set up in the trees on a bluff overlookng the facility ad have a few run-ins with the guests, pretending to be other patrons of the spa. While they’re out in the rain, with the mists from the hot springs and cool rain (very atmosperic), the officers tour and enjoy the facility while Chaplain hacks the mainframe and finds a wealth of information on the Cylon operations — the kind of technology they’re using, the people they’ve used it on, and he manages to snag much of it and dumps it to a cloud drive on the LeoNet, with a timed forward to his CSS email account. He goes to find the officers and when he opens the door, there is a moment where he faces off against the wife/surgeon side of the couple that run the place.

Pindarus and Querro question the male half, a physical therapist who looks a lot like Rick Worthy. They find him pleasant and seemingly authentic, and they get him to give them a tour of the new medical facility where guests will be able to get cosmetic surgery. There they link up with Chaplain, in some sort of daze while the firmware that the Cylons put in him ten years ago during his car accident (and the inspiration for his fantasies of being abducted by aliens) — he’s been the information link that has been allowing the Cylons to stay ahead of Riptide. He has actively worked for them; they just monitor his senses and short-term memory and collected data through him — a human camera or bug.

The place is part high-end, minimalist aesthetic surgery, as advertised, but the wealth of creepy biomechanical tentacles equipped with surgical instrumetns and clusters of senors added a good creepy quality. They also see the other surgeon here…a twin or something of the owner! They quickly realize the danger they are in and the fight ensues in which we get a taste of the speed and strength of the Cylons. Even these non-combat models do a pretty good job on the characters and I had an initial worry of a total party kill. Pindarus gets pretty badly banged up, Chaplin a busted nose, and Querro — the man that almost never gets range time as a legal officer — saves the day by using a dropped pistol during the fray to drop one of the Cylons. (Chaplain got the woman.) the other surgeon escapes.

Outside, the marines get aggressed by a copy of the woman and a pair of highly-professional, but oddly robotic moving men. She drops two of the marines using a crossbow, the men have suppressed P90s that do a good job on another, leaving Cadmus alone to fight them. He takes a bolt in the ass, manages to wrestle away the P90 but it jammed (botch roll), and he wound up using the body of one of the men to catch rounds, then rolled with him down the hill they were on and off a 20′ cliff into one of the hot springs below. The woman follwed, leaping into the pool, and he stops her with a well-places underwater shot to the head (deafening himself in the process.)

The PCs link up outside the medical facility and run for their car in the parking lot. Minutes later, the medical facility (not the whole spa) blows itself all over the place in a mighty explosion. The characters inform the local CSS branch and local cops and beat a retreat to CSS HQ, where Chaplain is adamant about being debriefed immediately, the others go for medical attention.

End of play for the night. There’s a few obvious issues for the characters: What was going on with Chaplain? Pindarus is paranoid enough that this will definitely play out next session. Is the information he uploaded safe? What about the people they saw — two pairs of twins? What are the chances of that? Can the Cylons clone people? Or were they machines with flesh covering? How will the brass — already peeved over other high profile mistakes in the last few sessions — going to handle a major explosion with at least a half dozen civilians injured and off-duty three marines dead? (Not to mention to officers injured…)

I’ve been watching Blood & Chrome, and on the whole I’ve enjoyed it. I have a few quibbles about seeing some of the ships from the Exodus period — Valkyrie and the Berzerk, for instance; I would have assumed these newer vessels from the big deal they made about Galactica‘s age in the miniseries and the assumption that there would have been some advance in ship design from the war to the Cylon attacks. Okay, fanboy moment over!

ORION CLASS BATTLESTAR (Heavy Cruiser)

[Sizes very very approximate based off of a screen cap or two…] Class: Orion   Type: Heavy Cruiser   Scale: Spacecraft   Length: 1250′   Beam: 300′   Draught: 290′   Decks: 9   Crew: 150+pilots

ATTRIBUTES: Agility: d6   Strength: d10   Vitality: d6   Alertness: d8   Intelligence: d6   Willpower: d8

Secondary Attributes: Life Points: 18   Initiative: d6+d8   Armor: 3W, 2S   Speed: 6 [SL/JC]

SKILLS: Heavy Weaponry: d4, Mechanical Engineering: d4, Perception: d6, Pilot: d4

TRAITS: DRADIS Absorbant Hull d4 [adds to difficulty to spot]

ARMAMENT: Medium Point Defense System [d10W Planetcraft scale, Skirmish Range], 12 Medium Spacecraft Scale Railgun Batteries [d10W, Capital Range], 8 Missile Tubes [d10W Medium Spacecraft scale, Short DRADIS Range], 4 Nuclear Missile Tubes [d12+d6W Spacecraft scale, Short DRADIs Range]

AUXILIARY CRAFT: 10 Vipers, 6 Raptors, 2 Shuttles

This is a best-guess Osiris from the Blood & Chrome webseries.

Thanks to reader Geoffrey Loggins who supplied us with a compilation of the errata for Battlestar Galactica. It can be accessed through the BSG Resources page, or directly at this link.

(For this piece, I’m using the Quantum Mechanix Map of the Twelve Colonies — which we use for our Battlestar Galactica RPG campaign.)

First off, I had to get a general idea of how fast BSG ships move — using the speculations over on Battlestarwiki.org, I worked out that the sublight Speed Rating in BSG is rough half the percentage of C; in other words, Colonial One with its Speed 6 is capable of up to .12C. (Yes, that means raiders are capable of .18C — really bloody fast…but it’s sci-fi. Roll with it.)

Now that we know how fast the ships can go, we need to know the distances involved in traveling around the Colonies. The map specifies an SU as the distance from Caprica/Gemenon’s barycenter to the sun — about the same as an astronomical unit (handy!) or eight light minutes. We now have distance pegged from light speed. We can get fancy and measure the orbits on the map, but I’m not quite that OCD — each of the four systems seem to have their outer planets orbiting at roughly 5-6SU. In each of the four systems, that means that the Colony worlds are never more than roughly 2.5SU away from each other.  You can assume that a trip from, say, Picon to Tauron at their furtherest from each other, take a liner like Colonial One would take about 2.2 hours, but a trip out to Persephone would be about 6SU, which would take a ship like Galactica about five hours at flank speed.

For communications time, figure the rough distance between the worlds in SU, times by eight, and double it for a return message. So if Picon and Caprica are at periapsis (closest distance) the time to cross .2SU is 1.6 minutes. If Caprica and Tauron are 1.5SU apart, receiving the latest Caprica Tonight broadcast would have a lag of 12 minutes.

What about between the stars? Helios Α and Β, and Helios Γ and Δ are both locked in barycentric orbits with each other, with a distance of 60 and 70SU respectively, and both pairs of stars are locked together at about .16LY. A message sent between Colonies in Helios A and B would take between 7.3 hours (for periapsis) and 9.3 hours (at apoapsis.) This means Galactica at full burn would take between 73 and 93 hours to cross the distance from Tauron to Virgon, depending on their position. You would have comparable times between Helios Γ and Δ.

For example: Using this map and speed rating, the old girl was, in the miniseries, hell and gone from anywhere when the attack began. It was roughly 30 minutes to get a message to Caprica, so she was 3.75SU away…out near the Erebos asteroid belt. We could assume she was on her way home from Scorpia Yards, but since they specified the ship hadn’t done an FTL jump in decades, she did it sublight. The distance between the two pairs of stars is .16LY. Even at full speed, Galactica would take almost two years to transit from Scorpia to Caprica.

That means that travel between the four stars is perfectly doable at sublight speeds and would explain why there were a wealth of non-FTL ships plying Colonial space. One thing it does suggest is that to cut down on communications latency, the Colonies use some kind of courier service(s) to move data between the two pairs of stars. I envision a kind of packet boat that jumps from, say, Caprica to Libran, does a data dump of bank records, government documents, express mail, etc. and that from a central hub the data is broadcast out to the destination worlds. Government, military, and financial data is probably shipped daily, but personal stuff might go weekly.

It’s been two weeks since the last AAR for the Galactica game. This is partly due to the addition of two new players, so there was a lot of intro work. One of the new characters is a JAG lawyer who has been brought in to monitor the actions of the characters and their investigations into Cylon infiltration of the Colonies. They’re research has led them to suspect toaster involvement in several mega-lobby firms and non-profits…all highly politically connected. This positioning has the characters in a difficult place, where they cannot push too hard for fear of riling up politicians tightly connected to these group’s money stream. The lawyer is there to slow the investigation, as much as keep them legally correct.

The second new character is a Colonial Marine Corps sergeant who has been assigned to protect Commander Pindarus (the lead in the series). He’s a young, confident but not as smart as he thinks he is son of a fisherman from Picon, who is somewhat prejudiced toward the privileged and wealthy.

The new characters needed some intro time and the character crosstalk has increased dramatically, which is slowing the plot somewhat. This is one downside to larger groups — add a player and I find the crosstalk doubles. If you have a player who is more of a time hog than others, that also slows matters.

The plot elements the last two weeks: Things are still moving at a quick pace. The characters had rounded up a group of suspects that were tied to their main target, a lobbyist for the Lucan Foundation, an educational non-profit that does a lot of policy work. They are the main force behind trying to downsize the defense budget in favor of social programs. these people had been smuggled past the customs at Caprica City Spaceport**, and one of them was later involved in an attack on Pindarus.

Their efforts are mostly a failure over the last two episodes. They make a move to arrest the lobbyist, but when they make their move to raid the condo of the man, all electronic devices, the power goes out for a two block radius of the building. Their quarry is gone, and all of his computers and storage media are trashed due to some kind of EMP bomb about the size of an 48 ounce drink cup — it’s technology far advanced of Clonial EMP devices. They find a strange mechanical fly, as well, and think it might have been a surveillance device that saw the breach team’s approach and popped the bomb.

The mission is jeopardized by the botched raid because the condominium was in the swanky Orpheus Park neighborhood — home to a lot of business, entertainment, and political figures. (Think the Upper West Side of Manhattan…) A lot of important people were inconvenienced and are blaming the Colonial Security Service. To make matters worse, the twelve other suspects they have all die in custody — the back of their heads popping from the “kill swtich” in their cybernetics. they track down the captain that brought them in, but he’s clean of cybernetics and cooperates reluctantly, but all his information is useless — save for one piece that links the lobbyist’s activities to the elusive Count Azarius Lucan — the man who founded the Lucan Foundation that the suspect worked for, but also the Prometheus Foundation, a policy think tank that is similar in size and scope to the Tides Foundation in the real world. Lucan has been a recluse since he suffered a near-fatal accident while orbital skydiving. He lives on a private island on Virgon, and it appears the suspect has been visiting the place off the books (something the foundation VP on Caprica says he would not have done.)

It’s obvious the Cylons know they are onto them and are trimming the loose ends. There’s other elements that have been in play, as well, family and friends and other distractions to keep the players off balance.

(**Worldbuilding element: the Colonies are supposed to have a freedom of movement between the Twelve Worlds, but  because of differing tax rates on various planets and some differences in product legality, travelers are supposed to go through customs checks. It’s a misdemeanor on most worlds to dodge customs.)

This week’s game would be called a “push episode” in TV vernacular: there was some movement forward on the various plots that have been coming together. The characters raided a Ha’La’Tha safe house in an old steel mill in the former industrial sector of Caprica City. Their target was Sio Faras — the local boss for what appeared to be a major crime cell connected to the attack on Commander Pindarus (the series”lead”) and to Ceros Grama, a powerful lobbyist for an educational foundation with tied all over the colonies.

The action sequence was quick, violent, and was the new player’s first encounter with Cortex combat rules. In the end, they had several of the baddies on the deck and Faras in custody. Fearing that she might be “lowjacked” like other Cylon agents they had tried to nab, they had two raptors on station — one to provide jamming, the other to do an extract to an isolated military location…in this case, the battlestar Galactica in high orbit.

They were able to interrogate the prisoner and while she didn’t give up much willingly, they were able to break down her sotry and find out 1) she worked for a Brigadier Davos — one of the last of the HLT commanders to be arrested (a few eps back), 2) She knew she was working for the Cylons, was terrified of them, and that the Cylons were using Tauronese desire to be out from under Caprica and Colonial thumbs as a means to motivate the crime syndicate. (They did not ask if she was a willing participant in the plot. She’s not.) 3) They were able to successfully CAT scan her head and find the cybernetic implants in her head — some kind of CPU near the medula oblongata with leads into her sensory-motor region of the brain, as well as her amygdala and pain centers.

They speculate she is a human “camera” — a probe that the Cylons can collect data through, either passively or through induction of pain/pleasure/whatever. They also have the connection they need to move on Grama legally, and they now know to turn their attention to this Davos guy.

Next episode promises to be more of the same, and I have a few surprises in store for them. (A few same decisions opened opportunities for me to seriously screw with them. I think I’m taking them.) All in all, the tone — of paranoia and Cold War machinations — has been holding up to extended play and as they realize how entrenched the Cylons are, the stakes are getting higher.

It’s been a crazy busy couple of weeks, between medical and dental appointments, child issues, and other stressors, I’ve not been able to post as often as I would like. So here’s an AAR for the Battlestar Galactica RPG.

We’ve had two “episodes” so far in the new “season”, which started with the addition of a new member to the gaming group. (His blog.)

The players are, respectively, the commander of Aegis from the rest of the gaming reports (now reassigned after the “screw up” during his mission to do reconnaissance in Cylon space to the soon-to-be decommissioned Galactica) who is on a three week leave before his next command — he has effectively been beached by his political opponents in the Fleet; and a Colonial Security Service (think FBI) special agent that is on the Fox Mulderish side, seeing conspiracies everywhere (and sometimes correctly so) and who suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident that had him recollecting an alien abduction that was most likely just his imagination integrating the medical attention he was getting at the time (now he’s starting to think it was Cylon experimentation he suffered…)

They have been looking into Cylon influence in the Colonies. Previously, the commnader discovered that Colonial citizens have been taken and altered by the Cylons. They apparently are brainwashing, or through cybernetic implants controlling the actions of people in the 12 worlds. One of these was a high powered lobbyist working for his wife, who runs one of the premier, pro-military-industrial complex lobbying firms in the Colonies. The discovery has temporarily damaged the influence of the Pindarus Group (the firm), and given them some insight into the Cylon operations: the Cylons appear to be using lobbyists, educations foundations, politically-powerful non-profit NGOs — the highly influential, but mostly unseen kingmakers of the Colonies — to tweak military policy, create social unrest, and plant agents through the Colonies.

The two episodes (about 3 play sessions, so far) revolve around the investigation of another high-powered lawyer/lobbyist for the Lucan Group, an educational non-profit that is connected to the Democrat-Republican Party (pro-Colonial government, but seeking a more federalist system with the individual colonies having more autonomy and sovereignty) and based on Virgon. Count Lucan is a rich and powerful former member of the Virgonian government who has gone recluse after an orbital glider accident. He is also the man behind the Prometheus Foundation (think the Tides Center for level of influence). The lobbyist was spied moving people onto Caprica around the customs at Caprica City Spaceport, and this got the CSS onto him. The special agent (Chaplin) gets roped ito a most secret operation called RIPTIDE, which he is shocked is investigating Cylon infiltration. He also realizes that Commander Pindarus (the other character) is crossing the Cylon’s path on several occasions…he doesn’t believe in coincidence, so could it be the Cylons are targeting him? He pulls Pindarus into the investigation, getting him seconded to CSS for the next few weeks (something the commander is happy to be involved in.)

After a high-power gala at the local Carnoss Club, Chaplin “looks the lobbyist in the eye” and realizes how dangerous the man is. (He has the Intuition asset, making him preternaturally good t sussing out things.) He also notices the man making cell phone calls while worriedly watching the characters at the party. Shortly after they leave, Chaplin notices a tail on the commander’s car. It turns out to be a planned “accident”, where the Pindarus car is tee-boned with a delivery truck. Paranoia is a watchword for the two characters and they avoid the second part of the bad guy’s plan: using an ambulance to abduct the commander and his politically connected wife.

Through a few slip-ups due to it being 2 in the morning and people not thinking straight after the accident, the ambulance crew gets away. Later, they figure out one of the drivers was one of the people smuggled into Caprica by their suspect. They attempt to arrest the guy but wind up in a firefight. The driver, shrieking for help and apparently not in contro of his actions, hurls himself through his seventh-story window to his death.

There was a lot of investigation work of cell phone records, traffic cameras, etc. but they figure out the operation was run by Tauronese organized crime elements (the Ha’la’tha) and that the “boss” of the group is in hiding. They get her location, and once they have her, they may have enough evidence to bring in the lobbyist, who is powerful enough they are worried venal politicians and other power brokers might shut their operation down before they can get any traction.

We ended with two plotlines ongoing last night: the raid on the Ha’la’tha hideout in a former steel mill in the rundown former industrial sector of Caprica City (damn those Canceronians and their favorable corporate tax rates!), and their hopes to arrest the lobbyist. It’s pretty obvious that sooner or later they’ll be headed to Virgon to confront the  mysterious Count Lucan, and a hint of the timeline they’ve got left was dropped — Galactica is due to be turned into a museum and decommissioned in six months.

 

It’s been a crazy busy couple of weeks, between teaching, handling financial issues, and wrangling a wee girl, as well as trying to recruit new players to the group. This week was another washout on getting people together (this is becoming a habit…I may need a new hobby), but the week before saw another Battlestar Galactica adventure.

The new player chose to play a Fox Mulder-esque Colonial Security Service agent (essentially, the Colonies’ FBI) who sees conspiracies everywhere. He’s a paranoid, but effective cop who is perpetually being shifted to crap jobs because of his tendency to slide off target. He has an uncanny intuitive mind and phenomenal pattern recognition…seeing connections that are sometimes not there (correlative, not causative.)

We started the episode with this new character on a stakeout, doing surveillance on a lobbyist for the Prometheus Foundation — a massive, multi-colony non-profit that is tied to policy analysis, education foundations, etc. Think the Tides Center, and you’re in the ballpark. They don’t know why, but Chaplin (the character) has learned that their information is going to an Operation Riptide. Riptide, however, isn’t on the books, so far as he can see…

They report on the lobbyist, who meets with an independent freighter captain based out of Aquaria (in our campaign, the most popular flag of convenience for shipping due to lax records keeping and regulation), where he arranges for a  transport of a dozen or so people that the freighter apparently smuggled onto Caprica without them going through immigration control (a formality in our campaign — there’s supposed to be open travel between Colonies, but it rarely works that way.) Why the secrecy? They appear to be from all walks of life and get deposited by minibus at various points in Caprica City. Chaplin, curiosity piqued, does some research on their target, but before he can finish, they are called to report the next day to CSS HQ.

He has been transfered to Riptide because of his pattern recognition skills and his ability to ferret out real (and imagined) conspiracies. He finds out about the Cylon agents active in the Colonies, and that Riptide is the codeword for the counterespionage mission to find and isolate these people. He finds out about the cybernetic enhancements to these people they believe alllows the Cylons to monitor their actions, and that some may not even know they are spies for the enemy, and worst — that some of these “people” may actually be Cylons! They have been infiltrating all levels of Colonial society, and he notes that they seem to have some kind of connection to the politically powerful Pindarus family…but are they targets or conspirators…or both?

Meanwhile, Commander Alexander Pindarus, who has been “beached” in his terms, by being transfered from his command of Aegis and the missions across the Armistice Line he managed to lobby for to Galactica (which he later learns is scheduled to be turned into a museum…with a skeleton crew to operate her), returns to Caprica. He is intercepted by Chaplin, who wants to question him and try to get a feel for it he’s a bad guy or victim. Pindarus’ wife, a big lobbyist in her own right, doesn’t trust this policeman — they’ve already had a raid by the CSS that has left the Pindarus Group under investigation and their funds locked up. However, after a conversation about the situation, Chaplin wants to roll him into the investigation for the three weeks he’s got before Pindarus must take command of Galactica.

They were lining up a “chance” meeting with the lobbyist he had been investigating, who they think is a major node in the Cylon spy network, at a big political do that night…

Screaming child brought the game to an early end, but we’re hoping to pick it up again next week.